On Freedom by Timothy Snyder, book review

This is my review of the new book by the Yale University’s history professor Timothy Snyder, “On Freedom“. Unlike his earlier books, this is not a historical treatise, but a philosophical one.

Since 2022 the latest, Snyder became the most famous historian and advocate of Ukraine, his lecture series for Yale history students from 2022 became a YouTube hit. He incessantly pleads with all possible audiences and decision-makers in USA and Europe that Ukraine must receive all financial and military help it needs to win the war against russia. Also because russia must lose this war if it is to ever become a “normal” state and not a permanent danger to the world.

Snyder’s professional expertise is in the Holocaust and Stalinist terror, especially the three decades of mass murder on the territory of today’s Ukraine, portrayed in particular in his earlier books “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth“. Studying the murderous Nazi German and Stalinist Soviet regimes made this historian an expert on the topic of tyranny and unfreedom. In fact, his more recent books were “Road to Unfreedom“, which is about the rise of russian and American fascism in the recent decades, and “On Tyranny“, which is a short 20-lesson guide for Snyder’s fellow Americans on how to resist totalitarianism.

Through his books and his many lectures and interviews, Snyder became a well-known public activist for freedom and democracy, especially since Trump’s attempted coup on January 6th, 2021. The next US presidential election will decide whether USA remains a democracy at all, and possibly even whether we will have a World War III. As you can imagine, Snyder not only regularly denounces Trump’s lies, his fascism, racism and antisemitism, but also actively campaigns for Harris.

The new book, On Freedom, is, as the name says, on the topic of freedom, its intended audience is primarily US American. As Snyder points out, objective evidence shows that US Americans are on average less free than citizens of many other countries, and they are about to make it much worse for themselves.

The book is a philosophical approach to define what actual freedom really is as opposed to what it is often wrongly defined as, by oligarchs and wannabe dictators. The book is written in 100 vignettes, it borrows arguments from European thinkers like Edith Stein and Vaclav Havel, contains references to Snyder’s own childhood in rural Ohio and to his meeting with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.in 2022. The book ends with prescriptive arguments for a good government.

Indeed, government is the central topic of this book. Snyder early on defines the concepts of negative and positive understanding of freedom.

In USA, the libertarian view prevails that freedom is defined negatively, as freedom from a government which allegedly acts as the source of all unfreedom by creating obstacles. For Snyder, this is nonsense, he defines freedom not as freedom from, but as freedom to. While it is important to remove obstacles which keep you oppressed, in order to be able to have freedom to speak and to do things you find interesting or important, you need a good government which creates the condition for your positive freedom.

As Snyder argues, libertarian definition of freedom from starts by assuming a community of educated, healthy, property-owning middle-class and middle-aged white men who agree on their transactions by the equivalent of handshakes. Yet people are not born educated or middle-aged, and not everyone is born white or male or wealthy or has luck with a good health.

Snyder’s argument starts with the needs of a baby. An oligarch’s baby indeed doesn’t need a welfare state, because the oligarch’s money provides everything. But other babies do need a state which will provide for their safety, education and health care. Children are not born free, they are born helpless. They need a state to provide hospitals so they can be born safely in the first place. They also need kindergartens, schools and universities to grow up into informed and social adults. Children also need a state’s imposed rule of law to protect them from dangers, like, say, from being abducted by foreign occupiers or getting run over by an oligarch’s car.

Which brings Snyder to arguing against the false contradiction of freedom versus security. The historian says that freedom can only exist where the state provides for security. There is no freedom where armed gangs rule. Instead of providing real security, an autocratic government makes people constantly afraid of foreign dangers so that they surrender their own freedom.

Two big topics of Snyder’s argument are the concepts of “free speech and “free market”, both of which the historian vehemently rejects. To Snyder, only people can be free, not objects or abstract concepts like speech and market. There are also no “free countries”, only individual persons in a country can be free, or not. We cannot sacrifice freedom of actual people to serve the needs of things like a “market” or a “speech”. Simply because it is the oligarchs and dictators who profit and stand behind such false freedoms.

The concept of the “free market” which is allegedly restricted by governments, is easy to debunk: absent a governmental regulation, the so-called free market quickly turns into oligarchies and monopolies, which run on exploitation and even enslavement of masses and which pollute and destroy the environment. Historians and everyone who heard of the 19th century know that. “free market” is nothing but a fantasy by oligarchs, where everyone else ends up being their disposable property.

The oligarchs’ libertarian claim that the government restricts “free market” is nothing but an insidious lie. There can never be no government, if you abolish a good government which keeps oligarchs in check you will get a bad government by oligarchs in its place. The rich elites understand exactly that a government stands in their way of freedom to rule by oligarchy, to make everyone else unfree, and to destroy the planet because they simply don’t care.

Destruction of the planet by oligarchs is a major topic in Snyder’s book. He is a strong advocate for divesting from fossil fuels, for two reasons. The first of cause is the unfolding climate change catastrophe which threatens not just our freedom, but also our survival. For this reason alone we must urgently stop heating the planet by digging up and burning the remains of the ancient life if we wish to avoid our own demise. The other reason to divest from fossil fuels is the fact that almost all states whose economy is built on fossil fuels are authoritarian oppressive regimes fostering conflicts, wars and terror world-wide. Especially the fascist russia.

I was also happy to read that Snyder does not advocate for nuclear energy as the alleged green alternative. All other reasons aside, I guess he sees what goes on at the russian-occupied Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant to understand why nuclear power can never be safe. Just because the russians haven’t blown it up yet, doesn’t mean they won’t do it eventually. Or they might sabotage a nuclear power plant elsewhere in Europe or USA. Instead, Snyder argues in his book for investment into nuclear fusion research (next to sun and wind energy). This is the point where I am not sure I can follow: billions were already invested into fusion research with little hope for any economically viable energy production. In fact, the situation is so hopeless that even quackery gets funded as long as it promises fusion energy.

In any case, technological advancements are not possible in an oligarch-controlled “free market” without governmental intervention. Starting with patent laws, over consumer and environmental protection, and ending with massive investments like space exploration – only governments serving the interests of their sovereign people can provide that.

Free speech is a more complex issue. Surely it is a good thing when the speech is free? After all, Americans are prepared to violently storm the Capitol for Trump’s right to freely speak his Big Lie about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. For Snyder however, freedom of speech is a personal freedom of speaking truth to power. Trump’s constant lies and Musk’s open endorsement of fascism are not free speech, they are nothing but abuse of their power as tyrants and oligarchs. You cannot be speaking truth to power when you hold the power. Instead, freedom is when dissidents in totalitarian regimes decide to take risks to their liberty and their life and speak out. It is the freedom of speakers which needs defending, not “freedom of speech”. Trump, Musk or his fellow billionaires, or putin’s propaganda stooges never take any risks with their lies, their freedom is never in any danger. Incidentally, Trump announced prison and a “bloodbath” for those he disapproves of when he returns to power.

Snyder’s focus are people, their individual desires and personal values. Those can only be implemented when people are free. When people are restricted in their potential by poverty or racism, they lose their freedom. Some literally – as the book denounces, in USA prisons are a private industry, and this mass imprisonment, especially of Blacks, was established in the last decades as a tool of voter suppression and gerrymandering. In this regard, Snyder writes about his experience of teaching in a maximum security prison, to an audience of mostly Black student inmates. One of these students mentioned to have lived in prison before he even went to prison, because in his youth he never had the opportunity to go beyond his housing estate. Snyder was also surprised to see his Black prisoner students express solidarity with white people of Ukraine, because they sympathised with their predicament of living under colonial occupation.

Indeed, people who live in slavery or under a brutal enemy occupation have no freedom at all. But, as Snyder notes, while it is liberating to de-occupy the land by removing the enemy, as it happened in Ukrainian Kherson and Kharkiv provinces in 2022, more is needed to restore freedom to the liberated people. The state needs to return to clean up the rubble and mines, to provide the people with protection and services they need: schools need to open, buses and trains need to run, police has to return to keep order.

As Snyder argues, freedom is the top value which allows all other values to exist. He defines freedom in 5 categories:

• Sovereignty, which is about being treated as person, with needs, desires, interests, opinions and social interactions, instead as a faceless part of a group to be ruled or even destroyed.
• Unpredictability, which makes citizens of a democracy different from totalitarian subjects. Your personal choices in life shouldn’t be predictable and controlled by some power. Already in late 2013, Ukrainians rose and bonded together to overthrow their kleptocratic ruler and then a few months later to fight the russian aggression. Russia’s populace on the other hand (safe for a few dissidents already imprisoned), are predictably obedient and afraid of their regime and especially of each other.
• Mobility, both geographical and socio-economical. This is where Snyder argues that the American Dream died in 1980ies, when the US government turned to satisfying the needs of oligarchs, which lead to most of money being concentrated in the hands of the very few. As the result, social advancement which was possible until 1970ies, became a fraudulent myth for most Americans.
• Factuality, the right to facts as opposed to opinions and lies. Here Snyder argues about the importance of investigative journalism, especially the local news. People who do not have the facts at their disposal and do not know what is going on around them, cannot be free. They become subjects of those who lie to them.
• Solidarity, which is about people making sure their society and their government provide safety, health care and education for everyone, not just for the ruling classes or the oligarchs.

Freedom is about taking decisions and taking risks. An unfree person will cowardly go for the safest route, be it flight, obedience, betrayal or lying. An example of a free person is for Snyder Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy. He could have fled in February 2022 when the russian full-scale war began and troops of russian assassins were roaming through Kyiv, seeking to kill him. In fact, every politician and every expert predicted in early 2022 that Zelenskyy will flee (not Snyder though). Instead, Zelenskyy stayed, daily risking his life since then. As the Ukrainian president told the visiting US historian, he had no other choice but to stay. For Snyder, freedom is sometimes about allowing yourself no other choices but the difficult yet decent one.

To conclude, the ideas Snyder postulates in his book are very important and highly timely, as our societies everywhere tatter on the brink of autocracy and fascism. I definitely invite you to watch his lectures and interviews, it is a pity that Snyder’s sense of humour and his gift for irony couldn’t find its way into his book.

By the way, there is another book by Snyder I previously reviewed, about the need for a functional health care, based on his personal experience of nearly dying from sepsis:

Disclaimer: as always, I am not paid for this review, but I did receive the e-book link gratis from the publisher.

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